phineasandferbfandomcom-20200223-history
Forum:When to shut down blogs
Occasionally, people will go through the blogs and add a comment to a blog that hasn't been active for a while. Sometimes it's not a big deal because it's a general discussion blog and someone might have something new to add. But for the blogs that are about a problem or a complaint, those are usually already resolved and new comments would not be necessary. We should set a time limit on how long a blog stays active after the last comment is posted. The cut-off date would be determined by the timestamp of the comment that is at the top of the list. This will prevent us from having to go through every single comment to see if a newer one was added as a reply further down the stack. On blogs that have several hundred comments, it can take quite a bit of time to check the date of every single comment to determine which one is newest. I propose that the time limit be no more than three months after that top-most comment is added. Two months might be more than enough time to show that a blog has ended naturally. Commenting would be disabled after that point. —RRabbit42 (leave a message) 23:32, March 12, 2011 (UTC) Discussion So basically, if it's an outdated blog about Phineas and Isabella's relationship, it's fine, but if it's about an annoying user, it's closed after 3 months? Tpffan5196 23:35, March 12, 2011 (UTC) : We've been inconsistent about this in the past. Right now, there are about 800 blogs on this wiki, and that's another reason why we haven't done anything about this until now: no one wanted to dig through that many blogs. But because people do go back into the old blogs and a new comment about an already-settled issue stirs things up again, this is why I'm now looking to create a standard for when to close an inactive blog. —RRabbit42 (leave a message) 23:48, March 12, 2011 (UTC) ::How about trying to get people over to the forum. One idea could be to turn off the blogs for everyone for a week and try to get people across the way, maybe if we start that habit, it will continue. (just suggesting, I'm against an uprising as much as you are) Bpendragon (leave me a mesage) - sadness shall not enter me, for I am an eternal optimist 03:37, April 17, 2011 (UTC) The Community Message Board really is set up better than blogs to handle conversations. Some of its advantages are: * You can include a quote from another person that you want to reply to (and edit it for just the part you want to include), rather than just have a generic reply. * You can reply down to as many levels you want instead of just the two levels the blogs limit you to. * We've got it organized into 16 main types of discussions (called forums), whereas right now we only have three for blogs, so it's easier to find subjects you're interested in, and we can add more as needed. * The subjects of the messages in each forum are displayed about 15 or 20 per page, so it doesn't take long to quickly skim through until you find something you're interested in reading. * You can add color effects to your replies and use the emoticons (animated smilie faces). * You can send private messages to the other members. You can't do that on the wiki any more since the e-mail function was taken away, so everything's public when you leave a message. * It has better search capabilities for finding messages. The wiki tries to match page names first and then looks for the phrase your're searching for, which doesn't work very well. * As people reply to a message, the message moves to the top of the list so it's fresh in everyone's mind, and when you log in, it also highlights which messages have new replies, which makes that easier to see. Another advantage it has addresses the need I brought up in this forum: it can be set to do maintenance on the messages automatically. Right now, that's turned off, so you can go all the way back to the earliest messages and read them (the blogs category just lists things alphabetically). We could set it to automatically close or delete anything that hasn't had a reply in, say, a year or 18 months. If people were using the Message Board to hold their conversations, then we would have less of a need to set a time limit on blogs. It would still be handy to have, for when we really do have blogs that have ended naturally and don't need to be resurrected. —RRabbit42 (leave a message) 06:45, April 20, 2011 (UTC) Resolution As outlined here, any blog that has been inactive for four months has been marked as inactive. —RRabbit42 (leave a message) 03:45, April 30, 2011 (UTC) When